Tag Archives: President Franklin D. Roosevelt

On the evening of Wednesday, November 24, 1937, United States Assistant Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, then heading the Antitrust Division in the U.S. Department of Justice, spoke in Washington at a private gathering of young, liberal Members of Congress. The group included Senator Sherman Minton (D.-IN), Representative Knute Hill (D.-WA), and others.

AAG Jackson spoke to these Senators and Representatives at length and powerfully. Jackson had, by then, become a national figure. He was a leading voice of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Its policies had led the U.S. economy to optimism and recovery following the worst of the Great Depression. President Roosevelt had been reelected overwhelmingly—he won 46 of 48 States—just one year earlier. But now the Administration, including Jackson, was contending with mixed economic conditions. There were signs of a renewed downturn and, as a result, some public discontent.

Robert Jackson, in this speech—which it seems that he made from notes and papers that, alas, he did not preserve—criticized some businesses for thwarting further economic recovery. Jackson recited statistics on recent business behavior. He discussed manufacturers’ recent price increases, which had produced high profits for companies but not led them to raise their workers’ wages. He showed the Members a chart depicting rises in prices and industrial profits.

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The next day, Thursday, November 25, 1937, was Thanksgiving Day. It seems that Robert Jackson and his wife Irene spent the holiday, with their daughter Mary (a senior at National Cathedral School for Girls) and maybe also with their son Bill (a Yale College freshman), at their home in Washington.

On that Thanksgiving morning, elsewhere in Washington, one of the young Congressmen who had heard Jackson speak the previous evening dictated this letter (which then got typed up, signed, and delivered to Jackson’s DOJ office, probably the next day)—

My dear Bob:

This Thanksgiving morning, before I tie into the things which are ahead for the day, I want to tell you how much I enjoyed and profited by your speech last night.

It was certainly an inspiration to anyone feeling his way through the maze of things as they are today. It was informative from first to last, and the best kind of a picture I have ever seen drawn of our problems and complexities in a brief space of time.

I feel that if closer relations existed between men like you and the elected representatives of the people, we should all be a lot better off.

With all good wishes, I am,

Sincerely yours

/s/ Lyndon B. Johnson

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During the next week, Representative Johnson (D.-TX), age 29, elected to Congress in a special election the previous April, continued to think about Assistant Attorney General Jackson’s November 24 speech. Jackson apparently did not respond promptly to Johnson’s November 25 letter. So on Wednesday, November 30, Johnson dictated and sent a second letter to Jackson:

My dear Mr. Jackson:

The more I think of your excellent address the other evening, the more I appreciate what a wealth of material and research was in it.

I wonder if you would be so kind as to steer me a little in my efforts to educate myself more fully in the lines which you followed out. Could you, for instance, tell me where it would be possible for me to obtain the full information concerning the increase in prices of products in the major manufacturing fields during the past few years, in their relation to increases in wages and in profits? I was most interested in that, and related phases, of your discourse.

With all good wishes, I am,

Sincerely yours

/s/ Lyndon B. Johnson

Representative Johnson—LBJ, if I may, although the fact that 1937’s Johnson would become our “LBJ” would not have been apparent then—was not alone in being interested. Two days later, Representative Hill also wrote to Jackson:

My dear Jackson:

I was very much impressed with your talk before the Liberal bloc last Wednesday night, and particularly by the chart you presented, which showed the contrast [sic?] between the rise in prices and the rise in profits in industries.

You may recall that I asked you if it would be possible to secure a copy of this chart, which you intended to have reprinted. I sincerely hope that this will be possible, as I am anxious to study the correlation in more detail.

Sincerely yours

/s/ Knute Hill

* * *

At the Department of Justice, Jackson’s staff moved to get him to answer the Congressmen’s queries. Someone put a printed pink slip, reading “SPECIAL,” on Johnson’s second letter. Jackson’s secretary Grace Stewart added a typed note: “Is the information available? Senator Minton also inquired.”

In mid-December, Jackson responded by dictating letters that were typed and sent back to the Congressmen. His letter to Representative Hill, age 61 and just reelected to his third term in the House, was direct:

My dear Mr. Hill:

I have not had a chance to get the figures which I used the other night completed with sufficient accuracy so they would be suitable for being publicly used. I understand that [Roosevelt economic adviser] Leon Henderson has some studies which are dependable, and I would suggest that you rely on his for the present.

Sincerely yours,

/s/ Robert H. Jackson

To Johnson, Jackson sent basically the same letter, calling his “figures … hastily assembled and pretty rough for public use.”

And it seems that Jackson responded to Senator Minton—who a dozen years hence would become his U.S. Supreme Court colleague—by telephone.

* * *

As Thanksgiving Day dawns tomorrow, I hope that you wake up thinking of important topics and great people, and that you can make contact with them and get good responses.

I hope that you will “tie into” many good things throughout the day and always.

I hope that your representatives in government pursue good information diligently.

And I thank you for your interest in the Jackson List.

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This post was emailed to the Jackson List, a private but entirely non-selective email list that reaches many thousands of subscribers around the world. I write to it periodically about Justice Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court, Nuremberg and related topics. The Jackson List archive site is http://thejacksonlist.com/. To subscribe, email me at barrettj@stjohns.edu. Thank you for your interest, and for spreading the word.

In January 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated his number two official in the United States Department of Justice, Solicitor General Robert H. Jackson, to move up into the Department’s top job. It was becoming vacant due to the President’s simultaneous appointment of Attorney General Frank Murphy to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S.

The U.S. Senate swiftly confirmed the appointments. President Roosevelt signed Jackson’s commission and he was sworn in as Attorney General on January 18, 1940.

Later that year, war engulfed the European continent. By June, the United Kingdom stood alone as unconquered by Nazi Germany. The U.S. pursued significant rearmament, provided desperately needed aid to the U.K., and reinstituted military conscription. The prospect that world war would engulf the U.S. was real and alarming. And in November, President Roosevelt was reelected to an unprecedented third term.

In January 1941, as Inauguration Day approached, Attorney General Jackson was battling illness. In the end, it caused him to miss the inauguration ceremony and related events. But Jackson made it a point, on January 16, to dictate, sign, and send this a formal letter to the White House:

My dear Mr. President:

I hereby present my resignation as

Attorney General of the United States effective

at your pleasure.

You are about the enter a new admin-

istration significant because of the problems peculiar

to these rapidly moving times. It seems appropri-

ate to relinquish a position for which I was

chosen in very different conditions and for

qualifications which may no longer be appropri-

ate.

It would be impossible in words to

express my appreciation for the honor of your

confidence.

Respectfully yours,

[/s/ Robert H. Jackson]

President Roosevelt responded two days later by writing, in longhand, this note:

Dear Bob

I do hope you’re feeling

better – Don’t try to attend

anything Monday [January 20] unless the

M.D. really says yes.

Thank you for your note. It

can only have one answer:

Stay put

Affec.

FDR

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This post was emailed to the Jackson List, a private but entirely non-selective email list that reaches many thousands of subscribers around the world. I write to it periodically about Justice Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court, Nuremberg and related topics. The Jackson List archive site is http://thejacksonlist.com/. To subscribe, email me at barrettj@stjohns.edu. Thank you for your interest, and for spreading the word.

In early 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted Robert H. Jackson, then the Solicitor General of the United States, to serve as U.S. Attorney General, a member of the President’s Cabinet. President Roosevelt then appointed former U.S. circuit court judge Francis Biddle to succeed Jackson as Solicitor General.

Eighteen months later, Roosevelt appointed Jackson to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. At that time, the President, at Jackson’s urging, promoted Biddle to succeed Jackson as Attorney General.

Attorney General Biddle served in Roosevelt’s Cabinet for the next four years—for all of the remainder of his presidency, and for nearly the entire period of U.S. involvement in World War II.

On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt died suddenly. Harry S. Truman became the 33rd president of the U.S. Within two weeks, the new president recruited Justice Jackson to serve as U.S. chief of counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals—the appointment that became Jackson’s position as U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg.

President Truman also decided to appoint his own Cabinet officers. In the case of Attorney General Biddle, however, Truman chose not to communicate his wishes directly. The President had his press secretary, Stephen Early, telephone Biddle on May 16, 1945, to request his resignation.

Attorney General Biddle did not appreciate the President’s effort to fire him by emissary. So after speaking to Early, Biddle called the White House and requested a meeting with President Truman.

They met later that morning. As the story soon emerged in the press, Biddle told Truman that he had, immediately after Roosevelt’s death, submitted his letter of resignation for the President’s acceptance if that was his preference. Biddle added that he quite appreciated that a president would want to have his own friends, people with whom the president was comfortable—and Biddle had reason to think that this was not Truman’s view of him—in his Cabinet.

“But,” Biddle added, “the relation between the President and his Cabinet is such that if you want to accept my resignation, it seems to me that you should tell me so yourself, not detail it to a secretary.”

President Truman, reportedly embarrassed, agreed. He told Biddle, to his face, that he was accepting his resignation.

According to Biddle’s later memoir, the President “looked relieved; and I got up, walked over to him, and touched his shoulder. ‘You see,’ I said, ‘it’s not so hard.’”

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This post was emailed to the Jackson List, a private but entirely non-selective email list that reaches many thousands of subscribers around the world. I write to it periodically about Justice Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court, Nuremberg and related topics. The Jackson List archive site is http://thejacksonlist.com/. To subscribe, email me at barrettj@stjohns.edu. Thank you for your interest, and for spreading the word.

In late November 1944, United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull, nearly twelve years in office, tendered his resignation to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Secretary Hull, age 73, did not wish to leave office before World War II was won, but the reality of his recurring, worsening problems with pulmonary sarcoidosis and strong advice from his doctors dictated his decision.

On Sunday, November 26, President Roosevelt visited Secretary Hull at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he had been receiving treatment for more than a month, for a long conversation.

The following day, the President held a news conference to announce Hull’s resignation. The White House then released the texts of the letters of resignation and reluctant acceptance that Hull and the President had exchanged.

Later that day, the President nominated the Under Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., age 44, who had been Acting Secretary in Hull’s absence, to succeed him.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously and favorably reported Stettinius’s nomination to the full Senate on November 29.

The next day, the Senate confirmed Stettinius by roll call vote, 67 to 1. Notified of his confirmation, Stettinius travelled promptly to Bethesda to pay his respects to Secretary Hull.

Secretary Stettinius signed his commission and took his oath of office on Friday, December 1, 1944. The ceremony occurred in the Office of the Secretary of State, in the State, War, and Navy Building (today the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) next to the White House.

At Stettinius’s request, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson administered the oath.

At the conclusion of the oath, after Stettinius said “I do,” Jackson asked “So help you God?,” prompting Stettinius to respond “So help me God.”

Secretary Hull was of course unable to attend the ceremony. It was attended by other senior officials, including General George C. Marshall, Jr., the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, and Senator Harry F. Byrd (D.-VA). Stettinius’s wife and children attended, as did Jackson’s wife Irene.

The ceremony was well-lit and photographed by still and newsreel photographers. For newsreel film of the occasion, including Justice Jackson administering the oath and then he and Secretary Stettinius signing the commission, click here:

Coincidentally, December 1, 1944, was also the date on which Alfred A. Knopf published Harvard Law School professor Sheldon Glueck’s book War Criminals: Their Prosecution & Punishment (jacket price $3.00).

In the months ahead, Secretary Stettinius and Justice Jackson each worked on the challenges of prosecuting war criminals. Indeed, Professor Glueck became one of Jackson’s consultants in his work as U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg of Nazi war criminals.

The enormity of that undertaking might have been present, at least elliptically, when Stettinius stated to the cameras on December 1, 1944, that building world peace following the war would “need active participation and support of all….”

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This post was emailed to the Jackson List, a private but entirely non-selective email list that reaches many thousands of subscribers around the world. I write to it periodically about Justice Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court, Nuremberg and related topics. The Jackson List archive site is http://thejacksonlist.com/. To subscribe, email me at barrettj@stjohns.edu. Thank you for your interest, and for spreading the word.

I received yesterday the new memoir by Harold Burson, The Business of Persuasion. Now in his tenth decade, Harold is a giant in the field of public relations, co-founder of the global firm Burson-Marsteller, formerly an Armed Forces Radio Network reporter during 1945-46 at the international Nuremberg trial of the principal Nazi war criminals, a truly wise man, and, I’m very lucky to say, my friend.

I have only begun to read the book. So far it’s smooth and smart, filled with great stories and clear, profound life-lessons. Harold calls these his “Takeaways,” and he very helpfully itemizes these keys to success at the end of each chapter.

When I finish reading Harold’s book—which will be soon, because, as he writes in a first chapter Takeway, daily reading of good material is both a pleasure and wise—I plan to write more about it.

I’m writing now about a Chapter One nugget because it’s striking and timely.

As Harold Burson recounts, he was an important adviser and friend to President Ronald Reagan, especially in his post-presidency years.

October 10, 1984: Hugh Downs, Harold Burson, Jack Anderson, and President Reagan, at the White House launch of the Young Astronauts program

In 1989, Harold advised President Reagan, newly-retired and beginning to give talks to various audiences, to include in his speeches some bipartisan messages.

Reagan liked the advice. He then described two issues that had concerned him for a long time.

One was the Twenty-Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Since the 1950s, it has limited presidents to two terms. Reagan, having been there, thought it was terrible that the Constitution makes every reelected president a lame duck. He preferred to trust the possibility of third terms to presidents’ sound personal decision making, and also to voters. He noted that he was glad that President Franklin Roosevelt had been able to run for a third term in 1940. (Reagan voted for him then, as he had in 1932 and 1936 and would again in 1944—F.D.R. was one of Reagan’s great heroes.)

The second concern that President Reagan voiced to Harold Burson was about the politicized methods that State legislative majorities use to draw the boundaries of Congressional districts. Reagan said, in substance—Burson is careful to note that he puts in quotation marks the substance, reconstructed from documents and memory, of what a person said, not his verbatim words—that

“[r]ather than leaving it to the politics of whichever party controls a state’s legislature, each state should have an independent nonpartisan commission whose sole responsibility is redistricting based on census results.” [Reagan] condemned gerrymandering; there should be geographic integrity in setting the boundaries of congressional districts. (p. 22)

Harold Burson agreed with the logic of President Reagan’s bipartisan—which is to say, really, his nonpartisan—position, and obviously I do too.

The U.S. Supreme Court currently is deciding the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering in state legislative districts. The case, Gill v. Whitford, was argued last week, and the Court’s decision is expected in coming months. For information on the case, including briefs and a link to oral argument audio, visit this SCOTUSblog page:

The issue that concerned President Reagan, partisan gerrymandering of Congressional districts, is formally different from Gill v. Whitford’s focus on partisan gerrymandering of state legislative districts. But the issues raise substantively the same question—the district line-drawers are one and the same state legislators, holding majority power, legislating boundaries so as to maximize their party’s advantage beyond its candidates’ abilities to win votes at the polls.

As the Supreme Court considers Gill v. Whitford, I hope that it will heed President Reagan’s wisdom—if it’s not too late to “file” another “amicus brief” in the case, maybe this can count as his.

On the morning of January 20, 1949, Justice Robert H. Jackson and his wife Irene drove in to Washington from their Hickory Hill home in McLean, Virginia.

At the Supreme Court building, they met their friends Floyd Odlum and Jacqueline Cochran (a businessman and a famous aviatrix and businesswoman, respectively), who were visiting from California. Later, they crossed First Street, Northeast, to the U.S. Capitol. They sat – separately, Jackson with fellow justices, Irene with Floyd and Jackie – in V.I.P. seats and watched the inauguration of President Harry S. Truman. Justice Jackson wore a small black cap, custom-made, from Livingston’s, a store in downtown Washington.

In Chicago, a young woman named Betty Stevens was one of many who watched the 1949 presidential inauguration ceremony on television. She was especially pleased to see two Supreme Court justices, Jackson and Wiley Rutledge, “walking along gaily chatting.” Her husband, Chicago attorney John Paul Stevens, had clerked for Justice Rutledge a year earlier, and Mrs. Stevens was happy to see that he appeared to “be in excellent health and spirits.”

Nearly four years later, General (ret.) Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to succeed President Truman. He, a Republican, would become president after twenty years of presidents (Franklin D. Roosevelt, and then Truman) from the Democratic Party.

In late 1952, Jackie Cochran wrote to her friend Bob Jackson. She asked if she and Floyd could be Jackson’s guests at the impending Eisenhower presidential inauguration.

Jackson, after checking, wrote back to her in late December 1952:

Dear Jackie:

I have inquired of the Marshal [of the Supreme Court] and so far as I can learn we can carry out this year the same program that we did at the last inauguration – which was that you and Floyd came to the Court and we went from here together. I think that will work out this time, although it may be something different. You know the slogan, “It’s time for a change,” and they do have to provide this year for two Cabinets and two sets of officers, incoming and outgoing, and two Presidents’ parties, whereas before there was only one.

The Inauguration Day, January 20, 1953, was indeed different. On that Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court had an official session. The justices took the bench and admitted attorneys to the Supreme Court bar. The Court then adjourned to attend, as it had four years earlier, the inauguration as a body.

At the oath-taking ceremony, the Justices, all bare-headed, walked in procession from the Capitol rotunda to the platform, in pairs according to their seniority on the Court. Justice Jackson walked with Justice William O. Douglas, smiling and talking.

Later that afternoon, the justices returned to the Court and reconvened briefly in official session. They did not hear oral argument in any of the ten cases they had, the previous day, put on call for January 20th. They sent “home” the attorneys who were assembled and prepared to argue those cases, putting them over until the next day.

It appears that Jackson was able to arrange for Floyd Odlum and Jackie Cochran to attend President Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration.

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This post was emailed to the Jackson List, a private but entirely non-selective email list that reaches many thousands of subscribers around the world. I write to it periodically about Justice Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court, Nuremberg and related topics. The Jackson List archive site is http://thejacksonlist.com/. To subscribe, email me at barrettj@stjohns.edu. Thank you for your interest, and for spreading the word.

In early 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was planning, at least to some degree, to return to private life after two terms in office. Robert H. Jackson was F.D.R.’s newly-appointed United States Attorney General. Jackson also was, according to private remarks by the President and many New Dealers, and thus according to many press reports that were trial balloons, F.D.R.’s choice to succeed him as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and then in the White House.

Events took other courses. Many, including very publicly Jackson, urged Roosevelt to seek a third term. In springtime, Nazi Germany invaded and soon conquered the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. In late June, the Republican Party nominated businessman Wendell Willkie as its presidential candidate. In July, the Democrats nominated, again, Roosevelt.

That fall, Attorney General Jackson took numerous short trips away from his Washington work to campaign actively—as was legally permitted then—for the President and other Democratic candidates. In early October, for example, Jackson spoke to a large crowd in Buffalo, New York, once his home. In this speech, Jackson decried Willkie’s phoniness, noting that “only when he talked to workmen did he find profanity and vulgarity in order,” which lost him “any opportunity he ever had to create anything like unity among the American people.” In mid-October, Jackson gave a law and politics address in Boston. Later that month he travelled to Jamestown, New York, his adult hometown, to speak alongside U.S. Senator Robert F. Wagner (NY) at a large Democratic Party rally. Jackson also spoke that month in Richmond, Virginia, and a number of times from Washington on nationwide radio broadcasts. In the first days of November, Jackson travelled back to New York State to give political speeches in Binghamton and in Yonkers.

And then, finally, it was time to vote. On Monday, November 4, 1940, Robert and Irene Jackson travelled from Washington, where they lived in a rented Wardman Park apartment, to Jamestown, where they still owned a house and were registered to vote. They voted in Jamestown on Tuesday, November 5, 1940—both for Roosevelt and his running mate Henry Wallace, I’m sure.

In Jamestown at that time, Democrats such as the Jacksons were a political minority and usually their candidates lost. That was true in 1940. Willkie carried Jamestown by over 1,500 votes, and he won all of Chautauqua County, where Jamestown is located. Indeed, Republicans across the county won every race.

But that was not true statewide. Although the race was tight, Roosevelt carried New York State, his home, with 50.5% of the vote.

Nationwide, the race was not so close. F.D.R. won 54.7% of the popular vote, to Willkie’s 44.8%. Overall, Roosevelt carried 38 of the 48 States. He was reelected with 449 electoral votes to Willkie’s 82.

In the new year, President Roosevelt was inaugurated, beginning his unprecedented third term.

Wendell Willkie, to his great credit, went to work for President Roosevelt as an international emissary and adviser.

In July 1941, Robert Jackson also took on a new government position—he was appointed by Roosevelt and confirmed by the Senate to serve as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and thus he resigned his position as Attorney General.

Justice Jackson of course cast many, many votes in the Supreme Court’s conference room, on cases, petitions, and other judicial matters.

But he never again entered a voting booth. In his view, holding judicial office was a responsibility not to be involved in politics, even at the private level of voting.

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This post was emailed to the Jackson List, a private but entirely non-selective email list that reaches many thousands of subscribers around the world. I write to it periodically about Justice Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court, Nuremberg and related topics. The Jackson List archive site is http://thejacksonlist.com/. To subscribe, email me at barrettj@stjohns.edu. Thank you for your interest, and for spreading the word.

Welcome to John Q. Barrett’s blog. I am a law professor at St. John’s University in New York City, where I teach courses in Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal History. I also serve as Elizabeth S. Lenna Fellow at the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, New York–I am a Justice Jackson biographer. My email is barrettj@stjohns.edu.

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